LEGO colors – introduction

When thinking of LEGO colors, RED, WHITE, BLUE, YELLOW and BLACK come to mind to those of us over 30. If you are younger, you probably know a lot more LEGO colors; like GREEN, PINK, DARK RED, and even SILVER. But you might be surprized to learn that in the early days of LEGO most of these colors were already around!

Here is a brief overview on how LEGO colors evolved:

1949-1956: LEGO bricks are called Automatic Binding Bricks, or ABB for short. Colors are plenty and we love seeing them, as plastic is new to us and these bright colors are great! LEGO comes in 3 different YELLOWs, ORANGE, 4 GREENs, 3 REDs, 4 BLUEs (with even LIGHT-BLUE), 2 WHITEs, TRANSPARENT, PURPLE, PINK and BROWN. A wild mix of colors!

And to top it all of there are even marbled bricks! These bricks had multiple colors in them, coming in beautiful swirls. Marbled bricks were considered second-grade quality and sold for less than the full color bricks. Today it is the opposite.

1956-1958: LEGO bricks are now called Mursten – meaning “brick”. The multitude of colors is downsized. We now have a steady supply of WHITE, RED, YELLOW, BLUE, GREEN and TRANSPARENT – with GREEN being very rare.

1958-1978: we now recognize bricks to be “real” LEGO, but something strange happened to them; apart from getting tubes underneath, something strange went on with colors….They all but disappeared!!!
For years on end, the only colors available became WHITE and RED. Great for building houses with roofs, but a bit boring.

There were actually a few other colors around – BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK and TRANSPARENT – but they were rare. GREEN is only seen as baseplates and trees.

Towards the end of this period we are slowly getting more colors again – BLUE, YELLOW and BLACK are becoming normal in the LEGO color mix.
With the Classic Space Sets LIGHT-GRAY reappears, and some GREEN and PINK also comes to join the LEGO world.

1978-1997: as far as LEGO colors these are the best years ever. Towards the end of this period LEGO is having a major 100 plus colors! WOW!!! Anything is possible! All colors are available! The sky is the limit!

But our dream could not last forever. The LEGO Group gets into some bad times and they are on the edge of going under. They need to reshape their product, and one of the things needed to save money is to use less colors. From over 100 different colors, LEGO goes back to about 50 colors. (At this time, DUPLO 2×2 bricks come in the most colors, numbering 46 different ones.)

1997-2003: luckily for humanity, LEGO survives and slowly rebuilds. Colors are kept to a minimum, but still we have a lot to choose from. We are happy, and can build rainbows and landscapes. Unaware of the horrible thing ahead of us…

2004 till present: the oldies amongst us think of this as a terrible, confusing period – one we would like to erase from common memory. LIGHT-GRAY got replaced by LIGHT-BLUISH-GRAY, DARK-GRAY by DARK-BLUISH-GRAY, BROWN by REDDISH-BROWN and our beloved PINK by BRIGHT-PINK. Some other colors are also changed, but not enough for us to notice.

Still LEGO is not ready with modifying colors! To save money, they no longer buy pre-colored ABS pellets (the plastic pellets LEGO is made from). They started to mix the colors themselves. The best example of this is the Harry Potter purple bus (set 4755) coming in multiple purples. Due to this change other bricks are becoming translucent against the light.

But in the end, we all love our LEGO and the colors it comes in. It feeds our imagination and makes it possible for us to build virtually anything and everything!

In going through my old legos with my 5 year old son. I noticed that I have pat pend bricks. Possibly some Bayer bricks also, because the bumps are rough to the touch. I also have some white bricks that have a hole on each side and have a clear plastic part inside the bottom, I have always wondered about those bricks? Any ideas? I could email a photo to be more helpful later.
Thanks!
Heidi

Hi Heidi,
Great fun to hear you are going through your old LEGO with your kid.
Most adults forget you must sometimes play WITH your kid:)
Those white bricks with holes in the sides are most likely wheel bricks: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=7049
About some being Bayer bricks, I can’t really tell from your description, but easiest is if they have weird colors, also they only come in 2×4.
You can always contact me, just ask Anna or I don’t know how this would normally work…..
Maxx:)

Hello, Maxx. I had no idea about Lego color history, though I am collecting and building Legos for a year now. I have some old sets and I love them even more than new ones. Definetly going to start exploring and collecting different collars and printed blocks . Once again I am convinced there is so much more about Legos I will learn ))) that what makes this hobby so amazing and promising ))

I love and hate Lego at the same time. I am currently a big fan of the Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series sets. Probably the biggest and most expensive sets Lego makes.

The reason that I hate Lego, is all the damn colors and the very slight difference between a lot of those colors. For example, I find it very hard to tell the difference from old gray to blueish gray in some of the real tiny pieces, and I have 20/20 vision.

I made the mistake one day of dumping all of my legos in one huge container to save space in my room by taking the empty boxes to the attic. HUGE mistake. Don’t ever do this people. Keep all the bricks in the box they came in or you will regret it.

Between all of the Ultimate Collector Series sets I have, I have over 12,000 lego pieces. This is a nightmare. I am still sorting the gray pieces. I mean, it’s like trying to tell the difference between bricks that are 1000 parts gray and one part white and bricks that are 1000 parts gray and two parts white.

Like I said, the bigger pieces are usually identifiable, but the real small pieces that are either old gray or blueish gray are a bitch to tell apart.

And then there are the pieces that are so old they get a little discolored just from age, and they look just a little different from old gray, but they also look a little different than blueish gray, and you know they are one or the other but you can’t tell which.

Misato, I feel your pain! One thing I found is that the best time to separate old gray and new gray is when the sun is at its brightest. Also, I found that with tiny pieces, if you stick them together to make a column it is easier to tell them apart. Or, just don’t bother separating them. Especially the old light gray and new light gray are very similiar. The darker grays are easier to distinguish. A lot of LEGO fans use both old and new gray in their MOCs asthey give a nice variation and more realism (like for castle-walls).

As far as sorting LEGO, the best I found is to sort them by type as that way you can easily find the pieces as you are working on a project. However if you are a collector, and you only build according to official instructions, they yeah, separating sets into their original boxes makes more sense.

Just keep looking, the perfect storing and sorting solution for your LEGO is out there. Many articles have been written about the topic by LEGO fans who are battling the same dilemma. It is not impossible.

Hmm, comparing these lists with set lists at Bricklink, it seems many of the early rare colors would actually be due to sloppy quality control.

I hear people complaining today about how the nuances of various bricks differ, but it seems to have been an even worse situation in the 50’s, where you could have gotten a brick of an entirely different color, depending on which batch that was produced in the factory…

Looking through Bricklink, it appears that most tertiary colors have been produced, except reddish orange, for some reason. Maybe it wasn’t considered distinct enough, or something… Would be useful to add highlights and gradients for rainbow-colored builds.

Turquoise/ teal has been phased out, alas, but possibly the Friends azure would be close enough to double, and lavender seems close enough to double for violet/ bluish purple. (The old violet only had one 2×4 produced as an ordinary brick, anyway.)

I really like teal and have a few elements in that color. It isn’t really similar to the Friends medium-azure. Teal is a lot darker – I would say that it is closest to regular green. The Friends lavender color is very nice and I really like it, but it is much different that the violet colors. While lavender is basically light purple, the various shades of violets are a slightly purplish blue. I really recommend putting together a color-chart for yourself. It is very useful to have as you are planning for projects, or just because it is so pretty see all the LEGO colors together!

Yeah. I could look up some of the older colors on Bricklink, buy a few bricks and see which would work suitably. Some colors have such a limited brick assortments they aren’t useful for much more than occasional high-lights, though…

That is true. It is still nice to have all the colors of LEGO. I collect 2×2 bricks, and Maxx (contributor here and personal friend) collects 2×4 bricks. His collection is huge with some really unusual colors that were only made for LEGOLAND parks. I have some very rare colors as well, along with a mistery color that has not been identified. I call it “cream”. Collecting LEGO colors is a very interesting hobby.

You would have to contact Maxx. He sometimes has some for sale, or he can get you in contact with others who may have them. These are very special bricks and most people won’t part with them for any price. But I know Maxx sometimes has extras he is willing to sell. To make this easy for you, you can contact him through his store. It is currently closed as he is busy with work, but you can send him an email through the Contact Store tab: http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=maxx3001